Seminar – 28 April – Bumochir Dulam

The Tragedy of ‘Environmental Pastoralism’ in Building Mongolian Identity

In the current paper I argue that in the last two decades a new concept of pastoralism has emerged from the discourses of the “anthropocene”, the “tragedy of the commons”, and a Nobel Prize winning elaboration of the “governing the commons”, which I call “environmental pastoralism”. The new conception initiated an understanding of “bad pastoralism” that essentially contradicts the traditional idea of pastoralism that has been strongly employed in framing the national identity. In this way the new environmental pastoralism treats the Mongol identity in the same manner that social evolutionary theory did when it referred to nomads as ‘barbarians’.